Bus stop balancing is fast, cheap, and effective

One big dream I have is to have some kind of free of cost at the point of service micro transit -- my dream is basically uber pool without the uber. Vans about the size of a Ford Transit or even a fuller size bus up to 40 passengers that picks up and drops passengers where they are or where they want to go to all with the push of a button on their smart phone and lots of patience. The idea is to have a huge number of government owned public transit vehicles that don't follow any published route but dynamically change their routes almost like some kind of Google Maps or Uber Pool but all the data about where people take rides at what time of the day and where they go and where the hot spots we have are now fully available to the government to improve the fixed route scheduled public transit.

> Nithin Vejendla is a transit planner in Philadelphia.

I feel sorry for Philadelphia transit future, this article is totally delulu. Go to any major European city and look how the proper public transport works, and you won’t have to reinvent the wheel

The problem with riding the bus in the US is that you end up around a lot of undesirable people.

What a strange article.

It only mentions in passing the success of express buses, which stop at e.g. one-tenth the stops. Like the SBS buses in New York City. On busy routes, these are already the main solution, because they stop at the main transit intersections where most people need to transfer.

Reducing the number of stops for local buses doesn't seem like it will make much difference, for the simple fact that buses don't even always stop at them. If nobody is getting off and nobody is waiting at the stop, which is frequently the case, they don't stop, at least nowhere I've ever lived.

Plus, the main problem isn't even the stop itself -- it's the red light you get stuck at afterwards. But the article doesn't even mention the solution to this -- TSP, or transit signal priority, which helps give more green lights to buses.

If you're going a long distance, hopefully there's an express bus. If you're going a short distance, bus stop spacing seems fine.

Also, what a weasel name, bus stop "balancing". It's not balancing, it's reduction. When the name itself is already dishonest, it's hard for me not to suspect that the real motive behind this is just cutting bus budgets.

> there are 3.2 feet in a meter

No, there are 3.3 feet in a meter. I know it seems like a minor quibble but it makes me not trust the rest of the article.

Please no. The only place I have extensively taken the bus is Philadelphia, which is listed as the shortest distance between stops, and I wish there were more stops. It gets very cold, and very hot here, no one wants to walk farther.

If you want to increase ridership, make the seats wider and run more often.

People here seem really afraid of walking for 2 minutes.

Counterpoint: The US needs infinite bus stops served by self-driving "buses". The fixed-route mode of transit planning became a dinosaur with the advent of the smart phone.

A lot of people arguing that these changes wouldn't bring benefits, or that the increased walk distance would crater ridership. I can provide some context from the SF 38 Geary[1] (often claimed to have the highest public transit ridership west of the Mississippi). Some time before COVID, there were 4 variants: 38, 38R which stops every three regular stops, and the 38AX and 38BX which would follow the outer route and then skip most of the stops in the middle(the former was explicitly meant to take commuters from the west side of SF to downtown). A dedicated bus line was added to Geary (with some resistance from some locals as in some areas it required removal of some parking spots[2]).

I have experience with the first three variants before and after the dedicated bus lane. 38AX only ran a couple of times in the morning, always packed and would reliably take 30mins from 25th street (it's last stop before downtown) to Market street. Before the dedicated bus lane, the 38R would take about 40 to 45 minutes from 25th street to Market street, after the bus lane it now takes 30 minutes (making the 38AX redundant). Before the bus lane, the regular 38 would take about 50 minutes from 25th to Market. Google maps now says it takes about 40 minutes.[3] So a dedicated bus lane made as much of a difference as removing every stops in between, while stopping every three stops satill yields about 1/4th of time savings even with the dedicated bus lane (and none of these lines start at 25th, used that because it was the final stop before downtown for the 38AX, riders coming from the start in 48th would see additional savings).

When looking at the ridership, the 38AX was always packed (as it came only a handful of times in the morning no one wanted to miss the last one and then have to take the 38R instead losing 10/15 minutes in their commute), the 38R is consistently more used than the 38. Right now the 38R comes every 6 minutes and the 38 every 15, so whether the ridership is impacted by travel time or frequency, I can't say. At night, only the 38 runs.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/38_Geary

[2]: https://sfstandard.com/2023/08/15/despite-protests-sfs-geary...

[3]: https://www.google.com/maps/dir/37.7799217,-122.4846478/37.7...

Great website design. Aesthetic next level

The only stops needed are the ones outside my house and outside my office.

The dilemma. Bus takes me about the same time where I want to go if I was just walking, assuming the bus spawns at the bus stop as soon as I get there. Last time I had to take a bus from place of work to home and took about 3 hours. Most of the time sitting in traffic and bus stops. I made the same journey with a cab in less than an hour. I think bus in busy town is only useful if you have mobility issues, carry a lot of shopping and have no funds for other means of transport. In my city also buses are typically occupied by feral youth, covered in dirt and smell of weed. You have to always check if the seat doesn't have fresh bubble gum on it or worse. Joys of London.

does the author ride the bus as their primary (or secondary or tertiary) form of transit?

Wrong.

This seems way too tightly focused on this one issue. If it were the case that longer distances between stops alone would result in increased ridership, then Las Vegas ought to have better ridership than most European cities by this article’s stats. Does it? Well, those stats aren’t mentioned in the article, but I’d be surprised, given that for the US cities for which I am familiar with their bus service, the average distance between stops is actually inversely correlated with the quality of the service. Hmmm.

I’m sure bus stop distance optimization is a good thing to do at the margins, but this article is not convincing that it’s the biggest problem with US bus service.

The United States needs a regulatory innovation that allows broad benefit actions that nonetheless have specific losers.

What has been proven to increase bus speeds is bus-only lanes and congestion pricing. This article is some techno austerity slop.

> lacking basic amenities like shelters, benches, or real-time arrival information. Uneven and cracked sidewalks and a lack of shelter or seating present a particular challenge for elderly and disabled riders.

Most stops should in fact be a pole where the bus stops frequently enough that you don't care about other amenities.

Furthermore it is deeply ironic that it suggests that we invest in fewer stops further away with more niceties for the elderly and disabled whilst suggesting they walk further because these folks often have more trouble getting up and down and walking longer distances than they do standing 3 minutes until the next bus.

May I also suggest that any study that compares prospective travel times before and after stop balancing especially if it be especially aggressive consider whether the actual decrease in time is just not having to stop because ridership actually decreased. See

> San Francisco saw a 4.4 to 14 percent increase in travel speeds (depending on the trip) by decreasing spacing from six stops per mile to two and a half.

If you had to walk half a mile on each end of your bus ride and possibly some more when you change busses you might reconsider the utility of public transit.

Whereas routes are often going to deliberately intersect to facility changing busses efficiently and this is trivial in small suburban areas in cities with a tangle of routes I've often found many practical routes suggested by google maps to involve getting off at a random midpoint of a route and crossing the street and getting on another even when traveling to fairly central locations. These fortuitous connections would certainly be decreased if stops were aggressively trimmed.

I also question that virtue of real time arrival information which is very expensive per installation and trivially delivered to the phone in everyone's pocket anywhere and everywhere for almost nothing if you are already collecting positioning info on the busses. I use one bus away for this. Put a QR code on the stop on the pole.

> Many of the solutions to these problems require money – running more buses, improving stop amenities, or upgrading signals – or the political will to take away street space for busways and transit lanes.

The solution is to do the things that are actually required. Not one weird trick to fix the bus system.

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Very detailed analysis.

I agree with the claim that "fewer stops, faster service" on the surface.

However we'd have to see if that's truly the case, as cities have red lights and traffic, so the bus stops anyway ... I believe, taking this into account, the difference might not be that significant.

It ignores the problem of people with difficulty walking, for whom 400 yards is a serious burden, and significantly limits their access to buses. And then think about bad weather, slippery ground, etc.

Many of these people have no other options: If you are elderly or physically limited when you are younger, there's a good chance that wealth is limited, rideshares and taxis are not an option, and if you can't take public transit, you are stuck at home.

Don't think about it as 'today I can't take the bus'. Think about it as, 'for the most part, I can't leave my home/block anymore'.

As someone who rides the bus: it's payment that causes slowdowns. Waiting for everyone to get on the front of the bus and tap often takes multiple traffic cycles. If we wanted to treat public transit as a true public good (as it ought to be), it should be funded from taxes and free at point of service, and then front and back can be used. But that'd be too much efficiency and cost the rich too much.

This article feels like he's picking the one lever he can when it's a bad lever. He created a new kind of ethical trolley problem by making it less accessible vs more efficient

buses are bad because they are full of ni ggers

Libertarian publication run by the wealthy suggests course of action that will disproportionately harm the poor, I’m shocked!

This sounds exactly like one of those birds-eye technocratic moves which inevitably destroys the system it tries to fix because of a failure to properly understand it, which nobody really can since it grew organically for actual reasons. Classic nerd overconfidence.

Read differently, the United States needs more of a forcing function to get people to take the bus and less focus on convenience.

You can maybe frame it as this story does that it is the time cost of the stops. This somewhat completely ignores the extra time people would have to walk between the stops, though?

It also completely ignores that Atlanta's metro does target about this distance for bus stops? Which would be a compelling argument against it driving adoption, to be honest.

People don’t use public transport for many reasons other than this, personal safety and comfort being two big ones that no amount of optimisation can fix.

I’d rather get to work half as quickly if it means I don’t have to listen to a druggie issue schizophrenic violent threats towards random women throughout my journey (occurred just last week on a tram in Melbourne). Other cities I’ve been to and used public transport in (NYC, Portland, San Francisco, Dallas, Sydney) have been just as awful.

All these public policy wonks really do seem to forget that most of us want to get as far away as possible from the psychos that seem to make up an increasing share of society, time and cost be damned.

United states does not need buses ! What might benefit is smaller vans that do more intelligent routing than fixed bus routes. Unfortunately city admins run bus services as jobs programs for adults and not for the convenience of the people. Buses get funded by taxes and not fare collection and as a result even private competition can not emerge.